Literature Quotes - Page 7

Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

I imagined I was God for a millisecond And became speechless for a long time.

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.” “There is correct English: that is not slang.” “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn't say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.

To the knights of faith nobody believes.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?

For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

This is your life – not your parents’, teachers’ or significant other’s. If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn’t feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car, get out – change your shoes and start walking.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

Dream by making and make by dreaming.

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76

One is never too young for fine literature . . .

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.

with you, the sense i have lost my place in a bookor simply lost — misplaced the memorywhich isn't in the last place where I looked.a thought that the clouds don't move — that it is wewho thunder past — there it is! an old vacation,a train ride — sense of immobility.as sky and forest scroll past in relation,we are not moved, pretend to love the view,resort at length to scripted conversationby a poet-turned-screenwriter who didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrongand now drafts action film scripts wholly two-dimensional unless you choose to don the 3d glasses that do not stay on —

Play With WORDS

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.

There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Give her books, where other people did all the running around and courting; it was far easier to read about such matters than to experience them herself.

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

Everything is still everything.The Poem Remains.

Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

I haven't re-read Kafka for forty years. I had a second read-through when first teaching English at the University of Warwick in the 1970s, but since then have not been tempted to return. The reason for this, I suspect, is that he is a young person's writer, not in the sense that only the young can appreciate him, but because on first exposure he is so comprehensively and unexpectedly formative that you may never feel the need to read him again. He becomes part of you, and your mind and spirit and view of the human condition are inhabited by his stories, his views, and especially his characters: by poor persecuted Josef K., by Gregor Samsa trapped in his rotting shell, by the hunger artist, yearning to find something, anything, that is actually good to eat, by poor K., who can't get into the castle to visit the Authorities. Kafkaesque: a world incomprehensible, alienating and threatening, absurd. We visit it with incomprehension and at our peril, lost at all points, disorientated, inoculated against faith, searchers for meaning in a book - and universe that either has none, or in which it lurks inaccessibly. Once you have read Kafka, you know this.

All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.”EDGAR ALLAN POE TO FREDERICK WILLIAM THOMASFEBRUARY 14, 1849

Tell me of your Willoughbys, Heathcliffs and Wickhams in literature and I will tell you I met them all.

To go against the grain is the secret of bravery.

Possible is more a matter of attitude, A matter of decision, to choose Among the impossible possibilities, When one sound opportunity Becomes a possible solution.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books." (p. 5)

Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?Estragon: I don't know.

Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as "daring," though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it.

But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say "wrong!").